


In a different light

by RaeJCharter



Category: Amelia Peabody - Elizabeth Peters
Genre: Childhood, Childhood Sweethearts, Childhood Trauma, F/M, Miscarriage, Misunderstandings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-02-01 05:36:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21399868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaeJCharter/pseuds/RaeJCharter
Summary: Oh, Nefret, why??But then you think about the story from her point of view, and it all looks a little different.This covers from Nefret's childhood to the end of The Falcon at the Portal.Originally posted on my Tumblr (https://raecharter.tumblr.com/post/162598169051).
Relationships: Ramses Emerson/Nefret Forth Emerson
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	In a different light

She was three years old. Every woman helped look after every child in the Women’s House, and the girl was more petted than most - for her odd golden hair, her unusual eyes, and - she knew this even at three - the kind of beauty that made people notice her. But every other child had a mother, someone who loved them more than life itself. Every other child had a father, someone who came to visit and offered praise to be treasured and boasted of.

‘Where is my mother?’

She had gone to the god Amon soon after the girl was born. No, it was not the girl’s fault. Of course not. Never think such a thing, little one.

‘Where is my father?’

He lived in the palace.

‘May I see him?’

They were reluctant, but a determined three-year-old with overflowing eyes is hard to resist. Two guards and one of the queens’ attendants escorted the girl into her father’s presence.

He was tall - all men were tall to the girl, but he was taller than most - and he looked down at her with an expression of utter blankness, like one of the stone statues of pharaohs that stood in the temples. Never in her life had someone looked at her with so little affection. The girl stared back up at him, and raised her hands to be lifted. ‘Father?’ she said hopefully.

Her father turned his back. ‘She is not my daughter. Take her away.’

The queens’ attendant snatched the girl up and held her tight. ‘Never mind,’ she said, as the guards led them back to the Women’s House. ‘Never mind, little one.’

If the girl cried, she did so silently, and the attendant said nothing about the damp patch on her shoulder.

But the girl didn’t give up, couldn’t give up.

By the time she was five, her father would hug her and had given her a name, ‘Nefret’; when she was seven, he called her ‘my daughter’ for the first time; when she was eight, he told her a little about her mother; when she was ten, he made her promise, over and over, to remain a maiden forever, or until she could return her to her own people.

She could have told him that Tarek’s mother, who had raised and loved her, and Tarek and Tabirka, who had played with her when she was tiny and taught her how to use a knife, and Mentarit, who had taught her how to deal with women’s matters, and the king, who had been kind to her - she could have told him they were her people too. She didn’t. If she did not promise, he might not love her, and Nefret remembered, still, how dreadful it was not to have a father.

*****

Nefret was twelve when her father died, when the power struggle erupted between Tarek and Nastasen, when Tabirka died in a distant land, when she realised that if she stayed in the City of the Holy Mountain she would be married off by the time she was thirteen, and when the Emersons appeared in the City to take Nefret away.

It was easy enough to make the Professor love her - she gave him all the artefacts from the City of the Holy Mountain that she could carry, which endeared her to him instantly. Aunt Amelia was harder, because she wanted Nefret to be a proper English girl, and it was hard to remember all the rules, especially since none of the other Emersons followed them. 

Ramses, just ten years old, loved her from the beginning, as a true brother does. Unlike the Professor, he knew she needed to understand this new culture. Unlike Aunt Amelia, he did not expect her to join it. In turn Nefret loved her new foster-brother as fiercely as she had loved anyone. Ramses had a talent for getting into danger, and she swore to herself and the goddess - her goddess, Isis, not the Christian God that Aunt Amelia insisted was the only true deity - that she would do her best to protect him. That was when the dreams started. It took her a while to realise that they were warnings - not of danger to herself, but of danger to Ramses.

*****

David joined them a few years later, and then there were three: David, Ramses and Nefret - all for one and one for all. Her brothers, her best friends, the most important people in her world. 

*****

It all changed again when she was eighteen and the boys went away for the summer. When they came back, everything was different. She thought it was just that they had forgotten her, and then she thought Ramses was grieving for Bastet, and then she thought maybe it was what happened as men and women grew up. If that were so, she didn’t want to grow up.

David let her back in again, after a while, but Ramses never did. He wouldn’t hug her. He wouldn’t tell her things. He would barely smile at her. He tried to leave her behind, in safety. She didn’t think he realised how literally she meant it when she said she would know if he went off alone.

She called it his stone pharaoh face, and if it brought back mostly-forgotten memories - well, no one in England knew that. They thought she teased him for her own amusement, and how could she tell Aunt Amelia or the Professor that she drove Ramses into a rage because it was better than letting him shut her out completely? 

David understood; David, who had also made the transition from Egyptian child-adult to the extended adolescence and enforced reticence of the English upper classes.

*****

Lia was Ramses' cousin, several years younger than Nefret. Superficially, the two girls looked alike - blonde hair, blue eyes, slim and short - but Lia had the curves and softness and kind nature that makes a girl lovable, rather than simply beautiful. Nefret had no illusions about herself. Men fell in love with Nefret because she was beautiful, and wealthy, and good at flirting; very few loved her.

She didn’t resent Lia for this, of course - no one could resent Lia - but she did wonder why the girl had dragged her out into the garden for a private talk. They were friendly, they were family, but they’d never been friends. Lia went to school in England; Nefret, after one disastrous year in school, had been tutored at home with Ramses and spent every summer excavating in Egypt.

‘What is it, Lia?’ she said kindly.

Now she had her private talk, Lia didn’t seem to be able to say anything. ‘David,’ she said finally.

Nefret crossed her arms, feeling a surge of protectiveness. David had been living with Lia’s family since the other Emersons had practically adopted him. As an Egyptian in England, he was vulnerable to any Englishman or, particularly, -woman. If Lia had taken a dislike to him - or taken too much of a liking to him…

Lia had shrunk back from the look on Nefret’s face. ‘He said I might tell you, if I wished,’ she said softly. ‘David said -‘

Nefret uncrossed her arms, now more confused than alarmed. ‘David said you could tell me what?’

‘I’m in love with David,’ Lia said, softly but firmly. ‘And he with me. But I said it first.’

She would have had to, Nefret thought. David would be too respectful and too cautious to ever bring up the topic himself. ‘Oh.’

‘Please tell me you don’t disapprove,’ Lia said. ‘You’re the only one -‘

‘That you can talk to,’ Nefret finished. ‘Of course I don’t disapprove. And of course you can talk to me.’

Lia’s face lit up in a smile.

Lia was the first true woman friend Nefret had ever had. Despite a certain tendency to drop David’s name into every conversation, she was kind and determined and astute, and soon Nefret loved her as much as she did David.

*****

Nefret wanted to be a doctor. It was for many reasons: nursing Tarek’s mother and her own father as they died; seeing the wonders of English medicine; watching Aunt Amelia help children and animals with a mixture of common sense, hygiene and medicine; her own ‘collection of strays’, as Ramses called them; the frequency with which she woke in the night, heart pounding and covered in sweat, to find Ramses nursing some cut or broken bone; watching people in Egypt - and parts of London - die of diseases that could be cured with clean air, clean water and a bit of soap. But becoming a doctor, a real doctor, was even more impossible for an English girl than becoming an archaeologist.

She set up a clinic in Cairo for the lower class of prostitutes. If Nefret couldn’t help those girls, at least her money could. Visiting left her feeling cold and sick, but she kept returning. The prostitutes were twelve or thirteen years old, or even younger, beaten, bruised, dying of venereal diseases or internal injuries or pregnancies they were too young to carry to term. The rest of the family thought her soft-hearted, passionate, unpredictable and irrational. Perhaps she was. The rest of the world thought her very presence in that part of Cairo was a scandal. She didn’t much care what anyone thought. Of all the victims she tried to rescue, those girls had the strongest pull on her heart; of all the villains the Emersons faced, the men who abused and fathered children, and abandoned them, made her the angriest.

*****

When Merasen arrived with the news that Tarek and his son were ill, what else could she do but go back to the City of the Holy Mountain, and help if she could? And when was stolen from her bed in the night, waking in the very room she had slept in as a child, what could she do but hang on desperately to the shreds of her adult life, even as her mind and her memory betrayed her? It helped to have Daria there - someone to protect and care for, someone to remind her that she was not a child, that there was a whole world out there who didn’t know or care about the goddess Isis.

And then Daria was gone. Ramses had rescued her, not Nefret. It was a betrayal. She knew, later, when she was safe and no longer so alone, that he hadn’t meant it that way. Rescuing Daria had been logical. He couldn’t have rescued Nefret - she was too well guarded.

She also knew that, if it had been the other way around, she would never have left him behind.

*****

She was putting up mistletoe, and Ramses came to hold the ladder. She smiled down at him. He was looking well, despite his latest accident, and had been getting almost as impatient with the Christmas preparations as the Professor was. It was good to have him around this year for once, even if it entailed the near-continuous presence of Maude Reynolds. She didn’t think there was any chance of Ramses falling for this particular girl, but one day - surely - one of the many, many women who tried to flirt with him would succeed. The one who had come closest, she had realised only months later, was the girl Daria, both courtesan and criminal, who stayed to become Tarek’s queen in the City of the Holy Mountain.

‘Where the devil did you get that?’ Ramses said.

Nefret snapped back to the present day and looked at the mistletoe. It had not travelled well. ‘In Germany. The berries kept falling off, so I put pins through them.’ Her feet touched the ground, and she looked up at Ramses. She always forgot that he’d grown from the ten year old boy she had first met; he was almost a foot taller than she. ‘It should be inaugurated, don’t you think?’ She stood on tip toes and pulled his head down to kiss him on the lips.

It wasn’t anything unusual for her to kiss members of the family, she had kissed David and the Professor and any number of the members of the archaeological community, so it was only when her lips touched his that she realised she hadn’t kissed Ramses in years - not since he was only just her height. 

Ramses stiffened, as if disgusted, and Nefret stepped back, trying to hide her disconcertion. His occasional bursts of disapproval hurt all the more because they were so unpredictable - at least, Nefret couldn’t predict them. Most of the time she knew him better than she knew herself, until, suddenly and cruelly, she didn’t.

*****

And then Percy, of all people, broke Ramses out of his shell, and Nefret saw what she somehow hadn’t before. Everything was said that should have been said many years earlier; everything was done that, well, shouldn’t have been done many years earlier. 

She slipped her letter to Lia into the pile waiting to be posted and waited impatiently by the door. She had never felt this way before. She was oddly aware of her body - the slight unsteadiness of her heart, the faintest of bruises where Ramses had gripped her hard the night before, the odd jump in the pit of her stomach when she thought of him, the lingering warmth of his arms around her as they slept.

She hoped Aunt Amelia wouldn’t lecture Ramses. It had started to grate on her, these last few years, how hard Ramses tried to meet his mother’s expectations, and how infrequently Aunt Amelia admitted that he had done well.

Nefret wouldn’t let her do that this time. She thought, with a tiny smile, of Lia trying to take the blame for seducing David, years ago.

Ramses blew into the house and raised an eyebrow at her when he found her in the hall, but he couldn’t - or no longer chose to - keep up the sardonic expression. His face broke into a smile, and Nefret melted.

Some time later, she pushed him away. ‘We must tell them.’

‘Now?’

She laughed at the look on his face. ‘I’ll tell them. You just need to look happy about it.’

‘That won’t be a problem,’ Ramses said, and he allowed her to drag him down the stairs and into the sitting room. Strange how such an ordinary thing, holding Ramses hand and towing him along, was now exciting and strange. Stranger to realise he’d been feeling this way for years, and never said.

There were five people in the sitting room: Aunt Amelia and the Professor, a filthy old man, a woman - a girl, really - trying to fix her veils back in place, and a tiny child.

‘Salaam aleikhum, Brother of Demons,’ said the old man. ‘See, I have brought your daughter. Do you accept her?’

Nefret froze. Roaring filled her ears. The infant girl ran towards Ramses, raising her arms. She had Aunt Amelia’s eyes. ‘Father?’ the child said.

Nefret felt Ramses flinch back. The girl stopped in her tracks. How many times had Nefret felt that same sense of rejection when Ramses turned away from her without explanation?

The little girl crouched to the ground, as if trying to hide. She was as pitiful as any of the prostitutes’ children Nefret had seen in Cairo, ragged and filthy and afraid. There was no kindly queens’ attendant to pick her up and tell her she was loved; her mother shifted in distress, but didn’t move forward.

Nefret felt the warmth of Ramses hand in hers, and fought the urge to vomit. She dropped Ramses’ hand and fled the room.

‘Nefret, wait!’

She did not.

*****

She only intended to put as much space between herself and the house as she could. After all, where was she going to go? Her best friends and family were Ramses’ friends and family first. If it came down to a choice between the two of them…

‘Nefret? I mean, Miss Forth? Are you alright?’

She looked into Geoffrey’s concerned gaze and utterly failed to smile. And then it all spilled out - not the night before (she couldn’t even think about that) - but the little girl with grey eyes who called Ramses 'Father'…

Geoffrey looked bewildered, but at least he didn’t tell her she was overreacting or chastise her for knowing, let alone caring, about prostitution. ‘Miss Forth, I don’t know what to say.’

Nefret shrugged.

‘Miss Forth - Nefret - I once told you that if you ever needed me, for any reason, it would be the greatest pleasure to serve you. That is still true.’

‘What can you do?’

He squared his shoulders. ‘I can take you away for a little while, while you decide where you want to go. You don’t have to go back to - to the house.’

Nefret imagined entering the bedroom where she had been so happy the night before. ‘No, I don’t want to go back there.’

‘Well, then. Wait here, I’m going to call a taxi.’

By the time the taxi arrived, Nefret was trying to think past the raging panic in her brain. ‘Geoffrey, I think I should go back. Perhaps there’s an explanation - perhaps that girl wasn’t the child’s mother -‘

Geoffrey looked uncomfortable. ‘Nefret, I don’t know how to tell you this.’

She stared at him.

‘I wasn’t entirely surprised by the story you told me,’ he said in a rush. ‘Ramses - oh, hell - well, there have been rumours. He would have made sure that you and your parents didn’t find out, of course, but that kind of - of behaviour does become known in certain circles.’

‘David -‘

‘David is not invited into those circles, Nefret,’ Geoffrey said gently, and then grasped her arm to hold her upright as her world tilted.

*****

If it were not true, wouldn’t Ramses have come to find her by now? Perhaps he didn’t care. He had abandoned her before when she was too difficult…

‘Nefret,’ Geoffrey said softly. ‘I would never ask you to do anything you did not want to do. I may be dead in six months. I just want to offer you my protection and, once I’m gone, your freedom.’ 

The worst of it was that she loved Ramses still. If she went back, there would be explanations - Aunt Amelia would have come up with something by now - and she would forgive him eventually. She always did. 

And then Nefret thought of a grey-eyed child cowering on the ground. 

And she took Geoffrey’s outstretched hand.

*****

_Dear Nefret,_  
_Congratulations on your wedding to Geoffrey._  
_As you might have realised, Sennia is not Ramses’ child, but Percy’s…_

Nefret dropped the note as though she had been burned, and closed her eyes.

Aunt Amelia was angry with her, the Professor would be hurt, and Ramses would hate her forever. And they would all be right.

*****

‘Geoffrey, you know I will stand by you if you don’t hurt anyone else. For better or worse, do you remember?’ Nefret spoke as calmly as she could. It was a lie. She could have murdered him herself, and she would if that was how this turned out. 'Give Aunt Amelia … No, give Ramses the gun.’ How could she have believed, how could she have not seen, that Geoffrey was a liar and Ramses was not?

The Professor shouted and lunged, the gun went off, and Aunt Amelia dropped to the ground. Nefret screamed. If Aunt Amelia died and it was her fault… then she saw that it was the Professor who was bleeding. There were more screams and shouting, and then a sickening and distant thud, but she concentrated on the Professor’s wound. Medicine, at least, was something she could do without ruining everything.

‘Only a scratch,’ the Professor said, pushing Nefret gently away, and it was only then that she realised she herself was feeling faint. Something liquid was tricking down her legs. She looked down in confusion, and then her vision went black.

*****

When she woke, she knew instantly where she was, what had happened, and that it was too late. Lia, Aunt Amelia and Kadija were sitting by the bed, their faces soft with sympathy.

Nefret met Aunt Amelia’s grey eyes, and began to weep, and found that she couldn’t stop.

*****

She did not ask to see Ramses, and he did not come to see her. She could not blame him.

*****

She was worrying them, she knew that. ‘I’ll be better soon. I promise.’

‘I am sure you will. Do you want -‘ Aunt Amelia hesitated. Nefret had never seen her like this: cautious, almost afraid, of speaking. ‘Will you let me come with you to Switzerland?’

If she had hurt Aunt Amelia so, she hated to think what she had done to the Professor.

She could not bear to think of what she had done to Ramses.

‘I must make a start,’ Nefret murmured, to herself, to the goddess. Perhaps also to the child she had lost before she knew it existed. ‘I am only hurting them more.’ 

Aunt Amelia was still waiting, still watching. 

‘I would like you to come,’ Nefret said.


End file.
